Databricks hits $188B valuation, a 40% jump from February, in a Coatue-led round
Databricks reached a $188 billion valuation in a Coatue-led round — reported at roughly $3 billion — up about 40% from its $134 billion mark in February 2026, its fourth step-up in 18 months. The repricing tracks Databricks's shift from big-data SaaS into an AI infrastructure vendor, selling Lakebase and its Unity gateway while championing cheaper open-weight models like Z.ai's GLM 5.2 to control its own engineering costs.
Source: techcrunch.com ↗
open models, and GLM 5.2 in particular, are now able to handle even the highest level of task difficulty in coding, and at a total lower cost than proprietary models from Anthropic and OpenAI.
Databricks blog post
Why this matters
- → Databricks now valued at $188B—highest valuation for data infrastructure company
- → 40% jump in 5 months reflects investor appetite for AI-first enterprise vendors
- → Strategy shift from big-data SaaS to AI infrastructure with open-weight models gaining traction
Data meets AI